Digital asset management (DAM) generally refers to the organization, creation, management, distribution and archiving of digital assets (interchangeably referred to herein as content or documents). Specifically, DAM may involve the creation of an archive, the development of an infrastructure to preserve and manage digital assets and a search functionality that allows end users to identify, locate and retrieve digital assets. In many DAM systems, such search functionality may be provided by receiving, parsing and processing the terms (e.g., keywords) of search requests.
While DAM technologies were once used almost exclusively by publishing and media companies, they are increasingly being incorporated into content management systems to manage other digital assets such as photos, music, videos, animations, podcasts and other multimedia content. Further, DAM technologies are being employed on enterprise-level scales, with concomitant increases in the volume and computational overhead associated with searching for managed assets.
Due to unfamiliarity with the content contained in these DAM systems, or the breadth of content types and volume in such systems, users may submit a greater number, or more complicated, search queries to the DAM system to find managed content of interest. The greater the volume and complexity of these search queries, the greater the degradation in the search performance and access times of these systems. Moreover, and importantly for the users of such systems, many of these searches may return less content for such searches, or content that is less relevant or precise than is desired.
Accordingly, what is desired are systems and methods for improving the functionality of searching in DAM or other types of systems to, for example, improve computing performance of such systems, reduce the burden of implementing such searches and improve the results of such searches.